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Frank Bruni

Who needs reporters? You do

If there’s a trend line at work, it’s of politicians’ being ever more orchestrated and anxious about the establishment of their own narratives (and they were plenty orchestrated from the get-go). President Obama rose to national prominence literally on the power of his own storytelling, with an electrifying convention speech and a best-selling memoir, and has since been emphatic about the polish of his public appearances and the distance at which reporters are kept. He prefers teleprompters and the soft focus of “The View,” Letterman and “Entertainment Tonight” to potentially messy interactions with political reporters.

The Clinton, Weiner and Bachmann videos, all different but related, simply ratchet up the effort to marginalize naysaying reporters and neutralize skeptical reporting. And as Chris Lehane, a Democratic political strategist, pointed out to me, they take a page from corporate America, whose chieftains have used that same format, as opposed to news conferences or interviews, to distribute sensitive communiqués. Lehane mentioned, for example, the 2007 video in which David Neeleman, then the C.E.O. of JetBlue, explained the airline’s brand-quaking operations meltdown.

But corporations answer only to shareholders and customers. Politicians answer to all of us, and have a scarier kind of power, easily abused.

It’s an overzealous overreach and a serious threat to our ability to police government, which has shown time and again that it needs policing.

If reporters policed government, he has a point. However, reporters DON’T police the government. Their leftist ideology proscribes that. Reporters can not be trusted to give you any semblance of the truth. So, as it stands now, we don’t need reporters. However, it would be nice to have an unbiased presentation of the news.

So you are saying that when you ignore Bengahzi and defend Crowley interrupting and lying in the middle of a presidential debate, you should be celebrated and lauded and trusted implicitly.

When you hound Palin’s children and dig up non-existent dirt on President Bush regarding National Guard, but completely ignore Obama’s sketchy academic record and curious serial lies in his autobiography, (“she was a composite of several girls”) you deserve respect?

When you track a story about a dog on a roof desperately and create a controversy out of whole cloth about a word “macawcaw” that no one knows, yet ignore finacial disasters like Solyndra and the IRS abuse, we should trust you?